Peasant farming in the Southern Tracts of the Amazon: The reluctant alterity of agribusiness

This article examines the main tendencies and perspectives of peasant family farming (PFF) in agricultural frontiers such as the Amazon. The ontological features of PFF are discussed, in particular the multiple associations with, and subsumption to, agribusiness. Due to national politico-economic pressures, the Amazon was reinvented half a century ago as a vibrant agricultural frontier that attracted a vast contingent of migrants due to coordinated government plans and, in more recent years, the cultivation of export-oriented crops. One very intriguing feature of this dynamic geography is that small family farming represents the Other of capitalist agriculture, but it functions as a hesitant form of alterity that both resists and fulfils agribusiness